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VANCOUVER — Ross Roe describes himself as "a very genuine young man." He turns 23 in August and has worked hard for the past five years with the same employer to earn his journeyman qualifications as an electrician.

"I can supply valid references," he wrote in an email exchange with The Sun.

If Roe was in British Columbia, where the demand for skilled labourers in just about every trade is expected to out-strip supply over the next decade, that resume would likely be enough to start him on a lucrative and steady career track.

But Roe is in Ireland, a country mired in economic turmoil led by the collapse of its once-epic building industry.

The resulting unemployment — which has soared to more than 24 per cent among men and women aged 15 to 25, (31 per cent among men in this age range) — has forced thousands of Irish nationals to look outside their borders for opportunity, Roe among them.

"The economic problems here in Ireland right now means that I will have to emigrate," Roe wrote before signing off with a polite plea: "If you can help me in any way with information or otherwise I would really appreciate it."

Ireland’s woes have not gone unnoticed by construction-sector leaders in B.C. who’ve been looking for solutions to drastically beef up the number of qualified and experienced tradespeople in the province in advance of an anticipated boom in the north.

A report released by the Construction Sector Council in March estimates 40,000 workers — from labourers to engineers to tradesmen and women — will be needed over the next eight years to keep pace with mining, pipeline, industrial and utility projects.

As many as 20,000 of those people will likely be recruited from outside the province or country, the report states.

With that in mind, said Manley McLachlan, president of the B.C. Construction Association, Ireland "has been on our radar for quite some time." McLachlan led a group of industry representatives from B.C. and Alberta to Dublin earlier this month, where he met with Irish government officials, labour leaders, school representatives and employers. The trip was an affirmation of what the local industry already suspected: workers trained in the Irish system are a good match with our needs, offering skills and experience that could be easily transferred.

The ad hoc delegation, which included representatives from Teck Resources and PCL Construction Leaders, also hosted several tables at an international job fair in Dublin that drew an estimated 20,000 jobseekers in just two days. Thousands more who queued up outside the venue were turned away, while a second fair in the city of Cork was similarly overwhelmed by participants.

McLachlan said there was, initially, concern among members of his group that Irish citizens might react negatively to B.C.’s attempts to lure away the country’s best and brightest.

Instead, the Canadians were treated as celebrities: featured on national radio, television and in the newspapers.

"People were stopping (us) on the streets," McLachlan said.

Since returning to Canada, the association has collected an estimated 850 CVs online from Irish workers offering a variety of skills and experience levels, with dozens more resumes arriving daily.

"We’re about to have our first placement," McLachlan said, referring to a young plumber who is expected to be hired for a project underway on Vancouver Island.

McLachlan said B.C. is equally interested in Ireland’s 4,600 trades apprentices who, with little chance of securing steady employment at home, have yet to complete the hours on the job they need. He said the Irish government is now considering amending its qualification system to allow its apprentices to have work hours earned with a Canadian employer formally recognized.

"We’re not thinking the Irish are going to solve all of the (labour shortage) issues," McLachlan said. However, similarities in training, and a shared language, history and culture all point to a good outcome for all.

Ireland’s building industry — buoyed by the so-called Celtic Tiger, the economic boom that began in the mid-1990s and collapsed in 2007, along with the world’s economy —_reached a high of $32 billion annually before 2009 in combined residential, commercial and industrial investment. These days, that investment has slumped closer to $6 billion a year — a figure that is unlikely to change soon, McLachlan said.

Kieran McCarthy made the leap to B.C. just ahead of the economic collapse. The 30-year-old electrician from Limerick moved to Vancouver four years ago after meeting his Canadian girlfriend while travelling in Australia.

In the years since, he said he’s seen a steady growth in the number of young Irish men and women joining his circle of friends.

"I was at a birthday party on Friday night which was pretty much an Irish crew. There are people arriving here every couple of weeks," he said.

Most of the people he’s met are travelling under Canada’s working holiday visa, which allows Irish nationals under the age of 35 years to work in Canada for up to two years. Canada is expecting more than 5,300 Irish participants under the program in 2012.

Many are coming without job offers, but, according to McCarthy, "they haven’t had any trouble getting work and, of course, that spreads back to friends back home."

Australia and New Zealand used to be the top destinations for Irish youth wanting to travel after they left school.

But Canada is fast gaining a reputation as the place to go to get a good job and make some money.

"I know people at home who haven’t worked in a couple of years, and they are very good journeymen electricians and plumbers," McCarthy said.

Roe, who has continued to work sporadically in residential construction since completing his qualifications in 2011, said he’d never really considered moving to Canada until he began to read about labour shortages in the media. A story earlier this month highlighting the need for skilled labourers in the north particularly caught his interest.

"It sounded to me that Ireland had struck gold when this came out in the papers," he said in an email.

He was among the thousands at the job fair in Dublin, but came away frustrated by the crowds and a lack of information on the much-talked-about work.

"One thing I noticed was that there were people 50 (years) and over, a lot of graduates who hadn’t worked before (and) a lot of tradesmen of all ages who just have no work here in Ireland and want money to live," he said.

But it hasn’t lessened his desire to move and create a new life for himself some-where abroad. He prefers Canada, he said, because of its proximity to Ireland relative to Australia, where work is also booming.

He finds the idea of being less than 10 hours by plane from home comforting.

McLachlan said that sentiment is popular in Ireland right now.

He recalled a Dublin cab driver telling him: "Immigration is no longer the life sentence that it used to be."

"The other thing (the driver) said was that it is better to have a job than to be on the dole," McLachlan said.

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